When did it happen? I’m not so sure. At some point, I started caring about what I wrote on my blog. I started thinking about what others would think. I used to just write what I felt like writing. I didn’t have this sense that I had an “audience”. Sixteen years ago, pretty much nobody I knew was online. I knew online people, of course. But they were online people. My tribe.

I realised that after following an online course called Writing Your Grief. It was just after Tounsi’s death, but I’d already signed up – it was coincidental. For the first time in a long time I was writing things that weren’t meant to be published, but that weren’t journaling either. It was an extraordinary experience: not just as related to my grief, but for the writing. We had a private Facebook group in which we could share our writing and read each other’s pieces. A room full of compassionate strangers. I hadn’t written like that in years. More than a decade, maybe. And I loved what I wrote. You know, when words seem to write themselves, and your writing actually tells you something?

Morning Pages do that, but they are less structured. More stream-of-consciousness. I haven’t been able to pick up Morning Pages again since Tounsi died. Maybe I will someday. Right now I feel like I’m holding on by the skin of my teeth, so I don’t have the courage to dive back in.
While I was mulling over this new/old writing I’ve connected with (again?), Adam shared a link to this piece about blogging. Which I read.

You know it’s a recurring theme here on Climb to the Stars. I miss the Golden Age of Blogging. And when I was reading the piece linked above, about how blogging went from carefree online writing to being all about influencers, my feelings finally collided into a thought: yes, that was it. I missed writing without caring too much about what people would think. About being judged. About having to be “good” because my job depends on it now. Similarly, I noted the other day on Facebook that I wasn’t online to sell or market stuff, I was online because I liked it here. Because I enjoy it.

Catch-22, right? Because I enjoy it, I made it my job, and now it matters. I’m not a nobody anymore. I have clients. Colleagues in the industry. And I care what they think. And so I write less. I’m careful. I self-censor – more. I enjoy it less.

And now I’ve found a different pleasure in writing. Writing things I’m scared to show people, because I hope they’re good, but fear they’re banal. Expectations. Ah, expectations.

It’s an adventure. The adventure of a mind bubbling with ideas and things to say and write. The adventure of a mind which would like to bubble with fiction that makes people dream big things, and read on in wonder at the worlds created.

But all she can come up with are disasters and worst-case scenarios. And she wonders: do people want to read about all that will go wrong? Should she give in to the dystopian fantasies her mind produces on a daily basis?

She’s not that sure about the dystopia bit, either. Because on the flip side, she has hope, hope so huge and solid that it smothers everything else. Beyond all reasonable hope, she hopes, and imagines things working out against all odds.

She has imagination.

What she lacks is characters. She needs characters to fall in love with and to pull her along through her stories.

Her adventure will be the adventure of conjuring up characters to carry her stories.

She will delve in herself and those around her, clumsily at first, cobbling together patchworks which will barely stand on their two feet. But with practice and patience she will grow nimble, and her characters will breathe life and love. They will dance through her worlds under sunlight and starlight, singing the stories their lives will weave.

I find that I’m increasingly tired with real-time. Keeping up with the stream. Living on the cutting-edge. I like diving into deeper explorations that require me to step out of the real-time stream of tweets and statuses and IRC and IM conversations.

I like reading and writing.

I’ve never been much of a “news” person — and I know that my little self and my little blog have no chance of competing with the Techcrunches and ReadWriteWebs and GigaOms that seem to be all over the place now.

Life is real-time enough. I like spending time on the web like in a book.

I still love Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and all the transient stuff that’s floating around — but sometimes I feel like I let myself get lost in it.

A couple of days ago I was talking to a friend, who amongst various activities she juggles as a freelancer, is a journalist. Lately, she’s been less satisfied by her journalistic work, which ends up not paying much, and was wondering whether it really made sense to keep on writing. But actually, her work as a journalist is what gives her contacts and leads for her other activities: so it makes sense for her to keep on being a journalist — but not for the money, as a marketing investment.

Come to think of it, I’ve only very rarely earned money by doing actual writing. I did an article for a local paper once, but honestly, the amount I was paid for the work I put in just made no sense. So, yes, as a marketing strategy, it’s interesting, but not for actually putting food on the table.

Even the work I did for Fleur de Pains, though decently paid, was way more work than expected and ended up being not that much money for the energy it took. Consulting, speaking and training are clearly better sources of income, or managing “my type” of projects (blog editing, coworking space, or conference blogger accreditations for example).

Most of what I’ve read over the last six months about writing fiction also points in that direction: writing for a living is insanely hard work and will not make you rich. We’re blinded by the black swans out there named J. K. Rowling and other successful writers. Most people who write for a living don’t become insanely rich, and most of those who try to make a living out of writing fail.

So, where does that leave us/me? I love writing, and I’m not too bad at it. Honestly, writing is its own reward, as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I’ve kept this blog going for the last 10 years (by the way: take a moment now to let me know what your favourite articles from CTTS are — the blogversary is less than 48 hours away!). And honestly, I think I’ll never stop writing. But I don’t think it makes sense for me to try to actually earn a living doing it. Which doesn’t mean I’m closing the door to earning *some* money writing — but if I do, it’ll be a happy *extra*.

So, in times like now where I’m giving quite a bit of thought to all I do for free and which ends up bringing me business, and also (given right now business is going pretty well) cutting back a little (not too much though!) on what does not earn me money directly, I am realising that I need to make it my priority to have enough time to write.

You know these blogging crises I go through regularly? “OMG I’m not blogging much I need to write more?” Well, here we are. If paid work keeps me from blogging, so be it — it means I’m earning lots of money right then, and I can live with that for a while. But if unpaid “marketing budget” stuff keeps me from blogging, something is wrong.

After reading Bird by Bird, I am now reading On Writing by Stephen King. And it’s making me think about my writing.

I’m a lazy writer. I don’t proofread, I don’t edit, I don’t even plan much outside my head. I just write. It’s never been a problem for me.

Reading King (and in parallel, Anne Lamott’s Rosie, which is so beautifully written it makes me want to drop everything and write my life away) is making me think about my style. There are a certain number of things I do that bother me, and that I don’t seem to manage to do differently. (Though, as I said, I’m a lazy writer — if I actually put a little effort into changing things, maybe I would.)

As you’ve certainly noticed if you read this blog, I overuse dashes and parentheses. I always have. I think it’s because my way of thinking is digressive. I start on something, and have to add some little explanative digression before going on. I do that when I talk, too. I start a sentence or an explanation, stop mid-way through, and add some extra background information that’s needed to understand what’s left of the sentence or explanation.

Anyway, I’m not trying to find excuses. It annoys me that I do that, and I think it probably makes what I write more cumbersome to read than it could be.

Another thing I’m guilty of is long sentences. Sometimes I feel they just want to go on and on and on and on and then I catch myself and chop them in half. I also think I use too many words. I’m not a very concise writer. I ramble. Like I’m doing now.

So I’ll let you go and read something else while I go and write a shitty first draft of something that I’ll never show anybody.

Are there any of my bad writing habits which bug you when you read me?

Another post on writing/blogging, yes, another one. I am in a “not writing” phase. I actually want to write. Ideas keep flapping around in my head. But the idea of actually disciplining myself to focus on writing about them just makes me want to hide under the covers.

I go through these phases regularly, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months. They last for a moment, and then I get back into writing.

I haven’t yet clearly identified what sets them off and what makes them end. I know there is a vicious/virtuous circle effect involved. The less I write, the more stressful the idea of writing again becomes, because all the things I have wanted to write about — but haven’t — during the “no writing” phase have piled up in my mind, and I feel that blogging regularly again means that I have 20 posts to write, and that they all need to be long, documented, enlightening masterpieces. It’s as if the “idea of blogging” or the “idea of the blog post” grows like a weed in my mind when I’m not actually doing it, and that makes the process much more scary than it actually is.

On the positive side, I know that “blogging again” always starts with publishing a blog post or two — which is what I’m trying to kick off here. Never know.